Food coatings for meats, seafood, vegetables and the like have been used for many years. In home preparation, the food is typically first coated with a batter comprising essentially flour, milk, eggs and seasoning, and the resulting product is then typically coated with bread or cereal crumbs which have been either dried or toasted. The coated food is then cooked, usually fried, and served for consumption.
Consumers typically enjoy food with a fried-like taste and texture. However, consumers also typically prefer the ease and simplicity of conventional baking or microwave cooking as an alternative to frying. Consequently, the food industry has responded by developing different methods and compositions for providing products which, upon conventional oven reheating, result in food with a fried-like texture and flavour.
In the industry coated food products are traditionally pre-fried in oil for 30-60 seconds at 180-200° C. prior to cooking/chilling/freezing. The purpose of this is for example to set or fix the coating to the substrate; to reduce the surface microbial load of the product; to develop colour; to add oil to the coating for enabling the product to be reconstituted by the end user in an oven or under a grill without burning; and to improve the mouth feel and eating characteristics of the final product after reconstitution.
The pre-frying process carries a number of inherent dangers which require special safety systems or procedures. Moreover, the pre-frying process is generally regarded as “dirty” in that often a great deal of time is required to clean the equipment after use. Further, the pre-frying process introduces large costs into the process for equipment, oil, energy etc. Furthermore, strict quality control procedures are required in order to ensure that the final product is as of the quality required. The term “the first thing that the consumer tastes in a fried product is the oil” is a major part of ensuring that frying oil quality is maintained at a high level. Moreover, consumers typically view fried foods as less nutritionally desirable due to the high fat content than other kind of foods.
Consequently, many attempts have been made by food processors and ingredient companies alike to find a way of eliminating the need for the pre-frying part of the process.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,531,200 disclose a process for preparing a frozen battered food product. The process starts with the pre-dusting of the food product to be batter-coated, followed by the application to said dusted food of a prepared batter, the composition of which batter comprises a cellulose derivative that coagulates in a hot water bath or in the presence of water vapour. The process continues with the heating of the coagulated, batter-coated food using a traditional, microwave or infrared oven, so that the coagulated batter coating layer does not melt on cooling, and concludes with the cooling and freezing of the above product.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,770,252 disclose a breaded food product being made by applying breading on an uncooked core food, and a starch overcoat film on the breading.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,266,339 disclose a method for preparing a battered foodstuff, particularly, chicken, which has the taste, texture and appearance of a fried food, but which has not been fried. The batters of the present invention are applied after the chicken has been cooked and while the chicken is hot. The latent heat of the chicken causes the batter to fix on the chicken. In a preferred embodiment, the batter coated chicken is further coated with a bread crumb mixture before the batter is fixed. The bread crumb mixture may also include flavoured vegetable based oils derived from frying chicken for the purpose of imparting savoury and fried food flavour characteristics to the non-fried food.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,943,438 disclose a breading crumb mixture and process for coating food products. The crumb mixture and process impart a fried-like texture and flavour to the resultant food products. The breading crumb mixture comprises extruded flour dough crumbs, dielectrically baked crumbs and beaded shortening. The process of the invention includes the steps of coating a food product with a binding agent, breading the coated product with the breading crumb mixture, baking the breaded product in a humidified oven, applying edible oil in atomized form to the surface of the baked product, and exposing the baked product surface to high temperature heating for the purpose of browning and crisping.